


No Scrubs

by lindseyloveslouis



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hospital, M/M, you'll either like it or you won't
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 15:38:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5791090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lindseyloveslouis/pseuds/lindseyloveslouis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Larry Stylinson, but as doctors. That's about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Scrubs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Happilysunlight (sunlight)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunlight/gifts).



> This is for Zo. The light of my life, that I haven't talked to in I think weeks, because I have been working on this for her. She didn't ask for it, this isn't even the plot she would want if she did ask, but here's chapter one of what I hope is going to be the first of many fanfictions that she inspired from me. So thank you for pushing me, for being so loving and accepting, and for always being there for me even when I'm not there for you.

**L**  
Red lights flashed through the rainy windows of Lake Park Regional Medical Center, announcing the much awaited arrival of an airlifted patient from an outlying hospital. According to the chart in front of him, the patient was an eighty-seven year old woman presenting with edema of the lower extremities, a distended stomach, and a tennis ball sized tumor in her lower right lung. The type of patient that Louis would fondly refer to as a “train wreck.” He sat up in his chair and stretched, surveying the nurses’ station from his spot at the end of the counter. It was a steady but calm night so far, something he was thankful for after the way the past forty or so hours had gone. He had a vague idea that sometime in the next six, hopefully, he would be in the California king he splurged on with his very first paycheck as an attending. 

He fiddled with the tag on his stethoscope, clasping and unclasping the worn plastic that he should have replaced the first time it popped off. Not that his was the latest model, but he was one of the few attendings hospital wide to actually be able to keep track of his. The rest bummed off of the nurses, who in turn bummed off of the techs, who in turn grumbled about buying their third one this month and how the money could have been better spent on their wild weekend out. If only his concerns were so small. With his free hand he thumbed through the chart once more, feeling the final remnants of warmth seep onto his fingers from the fax machine before going as cold as the countertop. The doors to the ambulance bay burst open and his reflexes kicked in; he stood to his feet and jogged over to the incoming gurney, scribbling onto the chart as the paramedic caught him up to speed.  
“Vitals stable en route, IV had to be re established in her right antecubital…”

**H**  
“What do you mean she’s hypertensive? Did you start the drip at exactly oh two hundred? Can’t you call her oncologist?” Harry sat up on the mattress he kept on his apartment floor, blanket falling from his chest and pooling onto his lap as he sleepily ran a hand through his hair. The last thing he needed at three in the morning on his birthday was a dying child, but it looked like the universe wasn’t feeling particularly jolly to celebrate yet another anniversary of his time on one of its planets.  
“Dr. Styles,” the intern said, voice hitching with probable fear at having to make this call, “please. He’s in Aspen for the weekend. You’re on call. I-I can’t do this. I don’t know why they left me here alone to do this,” she choked.  
“Alright, alright,” he murmured. “Start a five hundred bolus and I’ll be there in ten.”  
He swung his feet over the side of the mattress and stood up, blanket falling to the floor and goosebumps erupting across the entirety of his body. He pulled a pair of scrub bottoms from the floor and pulled them on, figuring going commando was the easiest way to guarantee good karma. If he wasn’t prepared for a disaster, one wouldn’t happen, right?   
Ten minutes later, as promised, he burst through the front doors of the place that had unwillingly become his second home, collar of his wool coat pulled high to cover his ears against the rain that was slowly turning to snow. It was more a first home, he pondered as he let go of the collar, smoothing it down to lay against his shoulders as he walked. His apartment was nothing but a place for quick showers and even quicker sleeps. He hadn’t even bothered setting up the bed and it had been what, eight or nine months now? He shook his head to clear the excess noise and snapped the band off of his left wrist, twisting his hair tightly into a bun and securing it. Long hair was absolutely frowned upon, but the skill set that came with it kept the hospital board quiet the first time he walked in to be hired. He sighed as he reached the elevator, jabbing the up arrow button with his thumb, wondering what he would be walking out to in a few moments.

**L**  
“I want a physician’s addendum for her,” Louis said, absentmindedly clicking a pen as he sat back at his seat.  
“All you have to chart is that patient was improperly cared for at previous -”  
“I’m well fucking aware what I’m supposed to chart, Maddie, but I specifically asked for a physician’s addendum,” he spat through gritted teeth. He dropped the pen to the counter and closed his eyes, rubbing his temples as he waited for her retreating footsteps. This was the sixth patient he had lost in forty seven hours, a record of losses for the god he was supposed to be. The god they hired him to be. He let out a shaky breath and opened his eyes as the paper was set in front of him.

With ten minutes of his shift to go he had successfully finished charting, and was sitting back with his feet propped up counting down each second to his freedom when the code was called.  
“Code blue, floor three, room three hundred sixty four,” the overhead blared. Louis kept his eyes on his watch, praying that his pager wouldn’t be the one to go off. There was another physician and a nurse practitioner on with him who still had longer than him until the end of their respective shifts. It wouldn’t be his. They wouldn’t need help with an intubation, they wouldn’t have a bleeder, they wouldn’t be unable to do anything that required an emergency medicine specialized doctor. At least, not him specifically. Hopefully.

His pager buzzed.

**H**  
Frantic was an understatement. The room was in utter chaos. The mother was screaming, the nurses were scrambling, eight year old Katie was choking on the final breaths she had, and Harry was seeing it all in slow motion. He took a breath and let it resume to normal time.  
“Did somebody page Dr. Tomlinson?” he yelled, shining the laryngoscope down Katie’s throat one last time, lip quivering as he let it set in that he was incapable of something he learned his first semester in med school. His answer was the loud slamming of the door against the wall as it was re opened.  
“Get her out of here,” Louis said firmly, surprising Harry with how much severity could come from someone so small, as it always did whenever he saw Louis run a code.   
It took two nurses to pull the mother away, and Louis was already pushing Harry aside at Katie’s head, gloved and gowned. He grabbed the laryngoscope and peered down her throat, groaning loudly.  
“Thirty more seconds and she would have needed a trache, and would more likely than not have severe brain damage. Aren’t you a pediatric doctor? Hand me a five millimeter,” he said, holding his hand out. A tube was instantly in his hand, and he had it down her throat before Harry could blink. “Bag her, push one of epi, someone start compressions,” he shouted over the noises of the monitor.  
“Why is her heart failing? She was only in respiratory distress, there’s no -”  
“Are you or are you not a board certified pediatric physician,” Louis said, weaving through the people to the defibrillator. A nurse slapped the pads onto Katie’s front and side, another continuing compressions, bumping into Louis’ back with each depress.  
“I am, but she’s got lung cancer, you tell me how that leads to cardiac failure,” he shot back.  
He wasn’t given an answer, only the second to step back as Louis yelled, “charge to ten, clear!” and pressed down onto the pads. Katie’s back arched and she fell back to the table, her heart rhythm unchanged.

**L**  
“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath, glancing back up at the monitor. Her rhythm was still tachycardic, and her blood pressure was decreasing rapidly. As much as he had been challenging Harry, he wasn’t sure what could have caused this either.   
“Charge to twenty,” he shouted.  
“Are you out of your mind? You’ll kill her.” He had always loved Harry’s voice, strong and steady through any situation. Not that he had many opportunities to interact with a floor physician from where he was at, but he had fielded many phone calls to check up on patients he sent up to Styles, and there was that one shared macaroni cup at the hospital Christmas party…  
“You have to trust me or she dies regardless,” he said as the defibrillator beeped. “Clear!” He pressed the paddles down once more, Katie’s back arching and falling, the rhythm going flat on the monitor.  
“No, no, no!” he shouted. “Charge to thirty!”   
“It’s over,” Harry said, grabbing his wrist, the monitor loudly blaring the monotone signal.  
“It’s not over,” Louis replied, jerking his wrist away. “Charge to thirty,” he shot at the nurse, turning to face her as she backed away from the defibrillator.  
“It’s over, Dr. Tomlinson,” she said firmly.  
“Time of death, oh four nineteen,” Harry called, snapping his gloves off and slamming them into the garbage. Louis watch him rub his eyes, looking as though he probably was on less sleep that Louis himself was. The nurse who had been doing compressions shut off the monitor; the one who had been bagging slowly removed the attachment from the tube.  
“You can’t just call time of death,” Louis protested. “You should have let me try again. Why didn’t you let me try again?”  
The nurse took the paddles from his hands, his arms going slack at his sides as he looked around the room. Someone was pulling a sheet over the little girl’s head and this made seven. Seven losses when it should have been none. His mouth went dry.  
“I have to go.”

**H**  
It took Harry the better part of an hour to find Louis, his wool coat over his arm and bun sagging behind his neck as he pushed open the door to the sixth floor on call room. He could still hear the faint screams of Katie’s mother, the screeching sobbing she had been doing as he told her that her daughter hadn’t made it. Two years fighting metastatic melanoma for nothing.   
“I should have checked here first,” he said softly to Louis’ back, his silhouette just barely visible in the moonlight coming through the blinds. He set his coat down on a chair and sat beside him, back to the cool cement wall. He closed his eyes.  
“You didn’t have to look for me,” Louis murmured, a definite scratch to the hum that instantly let Harry know some crying had taken place.  
“You lost quite a few patients tonight, that’s rough,” Harry said slowly, resting a light hand on Louis’ shoulder.  
“Yeah, well, that’s part of the job. I’ll live. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before.”  
“It’s not like it won’t happen again,” Harry added, “but it still hurts the same every time.”  
Louis turned and sat back to the wall, thigh resting against Harry’s, spreading warmth that radiated down Harry’s leg.  
“It was your intern. She fucked up the medication,” he said finally.  
Harry tensed.  
“Are you sure about that, before you go pointing fingers?”  
“It’s the only logical explanation. With all the immunosuppressants, all the chemo drugs, even choosing wrong between acetaminophen and ibuprofen could have an outcome like that. She was stressed and she was unprepared to be left alone in a pediatric ICU.”  
“So now you’re telling me I’m a bad teacher,” Harry spat.  
“I’m telling you that she’s incompetent.”  
“You know what,” Harry said, starting to stand up, “I don’t have to take this from you. If she hadn’t proven herself competent, I wouldn’t have left her to -”

**L**  
Louis grabbed Harry’s wrist and stood up, gripping it tightly to keep him from going any further.  
“Shut up.”  
“No! You don’t get to tell me -”  
“I said, shut up. We can fight it out later. Just sit with me.”  
“It’s my birthday,” Harry mumbled.  
Louis raised his eyebrows and nodded, letting go of Harry’s wrist.  
“I’m sure you want to rest up for various celebrations, then, my bad.”  
Harry smiled sheepishly. “I purposefully picked up a shift. I don’t have anything planned and I didn’t want to feel sorry for myself.”  
“That’s pathetic,” Louis said, stepping closer. Harry took a step back, gasping softly as he hit the door. Louis reached a hand out and locked it, resting the hand on Harry’s hip.  
“What’s pathetic is your crappy attempt to make a move on me by failing to save my patient and then locking me in a rarely used on call room.”  
“Are you going to let me finish my move or not?” Louis rolled his eyes.  
Harry nodded, and Louis took the final step towards him, pressing his lips firmly to the skin exposed in the v of the scrub top. Harry sighed softly, hands touching to Louis’ waist, encouraging him. Louis pressed another kiss to Harry’s collarbone, and another to the base of his neck.  
“I’m gonna need you to meet me halfway,” he murmured, tilting his chin up as Harry bent his head down, their lips pressing together slowly, feeling to Louis almost as if they were meant to never come back apart. He slid his hands up Harry’s arms to his neck, tilting his head and deepening the kiss as he freed Harry’s curls from the wretched bun he always kept them caged in. Harry’s grip on his waist tightened as he wove his fingers into Harry’s hair, tugging on the strands. He pulled away, grinning as Harry’s lips chased his for a moment.  
“Was that my birthday present?”  
“Nah, this is.” Louis let go of Harry’s hair, hands trailing down his sides to his scrub bottoms. He roughly gripped them and pulled them down as he sank to his knees, eyebrows raising.  
“You would go commando.”

**Author's Note:**

> I promise the rest won't be as jumpy, I just had a million scenes in my head, and it was easier to bang them out one by one rather than have an actual thread. From now on expect possible half or whole chapters devoted to one viewpoint. 
> 
> Don't come find me on tumblr, I'm not there anymore. Instead, find Zo, at happilysunlight, and tell her how much you love this.


End file.
